I’m always thrilled when someone of a certain age (ahem!) accomplishes a newsworthy feat. Diana Nyad (64) is the first to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage. I truly admire her.

This isn’t a post about swimming. I like to swim. Just not that much.

But something she said in an interview caught my attention because it has to do with the creative process. A reporter had asked on an earlier attempt what she was thinking about during her epic swim. She laughed and said she wasn’t thinking about anything. However, the theme from The Beverly Hillbillies kept running through her head.

Which made me think of the painting above.

I painted it when I was 25, just out of school. I remember a painting instructor had said that, after we finished school, we’d figure out everything we’d been taught was bullshit. He meant to provoke. It was an if-you-meet-the-Buddha-on-the-road-kill-him kind of thing. Deep. We knew he meant that once away from our outside teachers, we’d find how to paint from the inside. This is the painting that taught me how to paint from the inside.

It is not the painting I wanted to paint. I had visited the California Mission La Purisima near Lompoc.  It’s a beautifully reconstructed Spanish mission. I wanted to paint a pretty picture looking through a window to a nice Central California scene. I did some preliminary sketches, as my teachers had taught. When I got the composition the way I thought I wanted, I began to paint.

But something wasn’t right.

I did more sketches. I tried different things in the painting. Look at the image above. At one time there was a big window on the right looking out on the bright scene. There was once a table with a simple still life on it in the foreground. There was a chair against the wall. There were other things I’ve forgotten.

It seemed as if the painting itself had an opinion. It didn’t like any of those things.

Creating art can feel like swimming from Cuba to Florida. All of your training and prep and outside help got you here. Now it’s just you in the water.

I painted out each of the things that weren’t working. I painted tile floor where the table had been and wall where the window had been. I painted in a lot of things. And then painted them out again. I had to think about the light coming in the open door. How the light hit the floor at the doorway and then skittered across, dissipating as it moved into the room. How the light bounced up from the floor onto the uneven wall. The room seemed filled with light. And it was working. Pretty soon, I wasn’t thinking about light anymore. I wasn’t thinking about anything. However, the theme from The Beverly Hillbillies was playing in my head.

I was just painting.

It’s called flow. Or being in the zone. Artists and athletes are familiar with it. So is anybody who’s ever become so focused on what they’re doing, the outside world just goes away. Then the inside world comes out.